by Ken Glasziou
Preface
In the not too distant future the Western world, in particular, will face potential moral chaos when Christians realize that the Judaic-Christian concepts of right and wrong are built upon a house of straw. And in a world becoming God-less, whose opinions will or should prevail?
The reason for this gloom and doom? Since the 1967 war between Israel and the Arab nations, and the occupation by Israel of Palestinian territories, there has been an enormous effort made by the staff of professional Israeli archaeology institutions to gather supporting evidence for the biblical history of both Jerusalem and the occupied lands that justify the Israeli claim that these belong to Israel by divine decree-that is, God gave them to us!
The result has been a disaster for Jew and Christian. Professor Ze'ev Herzog of the Tel Aviv University writes1: "This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom." Worse still, in the days of Moses, the supposedly monotheistic diety of the Israelites had a female consort and intensive archaeology has revealed that at the time of David and Solomon, Jerusalem and its surroundings consisted of about 20 small villages with a total population of about 50002-a small kingdom indeed to have been the center of an empire described in 1 Kings 5:4 as stetching from Gaza in the south to Syria in the north and to the Euphrates river in the east.
How does this collapse of Old Testament legitimacy affect Christianity? One Christian minister3 has pointed out that it has profound theological effects-for example, Jesus could not be the embodiment of ancient covenant hopes or the fulfilment of divine messianic promises made to Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets et al, concluding that "those guys did not exist and God never made any such promises to them. We have to face the shocking fact that most of the Old Testament is late Judean propaganda with little historical worth, just as the Gospels are mostly Christian propaganda."
Another Christian minister4 speculates: "Given what they knew, Christians in the first century made sense of God and Jesus as best they could. The result is the New Testament.
And given what they knew, Christians in the fourth century made sense of God and Jesus as best they could. The result is the Trinity.
Now, Christians in the twenty first century must make sense of God and Jesus as best they can. The results are yet to be seen."
Urantia Book readers are not unaffected by all this. The Papers support much of what is written in the Old Testament that is now rejected outright as plain wrong. About Solomon the Papers say: "Solomon bankrupted the nation by his lavish court and by his elaborate building program: There was the house of Lebanon, the palace of Pharaoh's daughter, the temple of Yahweh, the king's palace, and the restoration of the walls of many cities. Solomon created a vast Hebrew navy, operated by Syrian sailors and trading with all the world. His harem numbered almost one thousand." But Isreali archaeology concludes that Solomon, at best, was the minor tribal chief of a scattering of small villages in a sparsely populated area of the hill country in the region of another small village called Jerusalem.
In studying these Urantia Papers, and pondering on why they were written as they are (a strange mix of errors and remarkable prophecy), it is critical that we take into account the mentality of their initial recipients, the so-called "Forum," the prejudices of the times, what might have been acceptable as revelatory truth in the 1920-35 period, what might have caused abandonment of the revelations as spurious, and the inevitability that some would treat everything they were told as divine, infallible revelation.
Parts 1-3 of the book were initially the result of questions posed by Forum members to test the credentials of the revelators.5 Hence,in hindsight, it seems possible that the original aim of the revelators was simply to prepare a group of people for receipt of their real revelation, Part 4, The Life of Jesus. Taken by itself, this is written in way that would never have gained the status of divine revelation-and the error content of the science and history present in what became "The Urantia Book" would never have become a contentious issue.
But now, approximately 70 years after completion of that book, plus an extraordinary knowledge explosion in virtually all spheres of human activity, we have to face the fact that the Papers abound in outdated, outmoded materials and concepts. This is the reality we must learn to live with, but taking care not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In terms of their spiritual meanings and values, these Papers stand alone, head and shoulders above anything else available to us.
Even back in the 1930's the "powers-that-be" were concerned about the rapid social changes occurring on this planet. Paper 99 warns us: "Mechanical inventions and the dissemination of knowledge are modifying civilization; certain economic adjustments and social changes are imperative if cultural disaster is to be avoided. This new and oncoming social order will not settle down complacently for a millennium. The human race must become reconciled to a procession of changes, adjustments, and readjustments. Mankind is on the march toward a new and unrevealed planetary destiny."
This is followed by: "Religion must become a forceful influence for moral stability and spiritual progression functioning dynamically in the midst of these ever-changing conditions and never-ending economic adjustments. Urantia society can never hope to settle down as in past ages." And: "The paramount mission of religion as a social influence is to stabilize the ideals of mankind during these dangerous times of transition from one phase of civilization to another, from one level of culture to another," and, "Religion has no new duties to perform."
Could it all have been planned? A paragraph in Paper 2 provides food for thought. It says:
"The religious challenge of this age is to those farseeing and forward-looking men and women of spiritual insight who will dare to construct a new and appealing philosophy of living out of the enlarged and exquisitely integrated modern concepts of cosmic truth, universe beauty, and divine goodness. Such a new and righteous vision of morality will attract all that is good in the mind of man and challenge that which is best in the human soul. Truth, beauty, and goodness are divine realities, and as man ascends the scale of spiritual living, these supreme qualities of the Eternal become increasingly co-ordinated and unified in God, who is love."
The reference above to "enlarged and exquisitely integrated modern concepts of cosmic truth, beauty, and goodness" can only be self-referential. These concepts are in the Papers. And it is a "new and righteous vision of morality" that is required of us. Again our best source will be the Urantia Papers. The material we need will not be in those parts of the book that relate to material facts. Rather, we will find what we need amongst that which has spiritual meaning and value, that part for which we can have certainty about its revelatory status.
The 2097 pages of The Urantia Book provide a content far too large to permit efficient location of reference material. This abridged version of its spiritual content may help to ease the task.
References.